Re: Re: Manual line breaks in emails

Hello, Dave.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 17:33:08 +0000, Dave Sizer wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Mar 2026, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > On Sat, Mar 28, 2026 at 14:07:35 -0500, Grant Taylor wrote:
> >> On 3/28/26 12:04 PM, Dale wrote:
> >>> I'm not sure what I should see.  The part above is ever how wide my
> >>> window will allow.

> >> That's what format=flowed does, cause the logical line to wrap at the
> >> window width.

> > That's assuming there's a window with width, which isn't necessarily the
> > case.

> > When I read format=flowed mail on alpine (aka pine) over ssh, it doesn't
> > get wrapped at all; it is displayed on lines 240 characters long, the
> > width of the console.  This is not comfortable to read.

> > Mail with linebreaks every 70-80 characters is somewhat easier to read
> > for me.  I don't believe alpine can be configured to behave better with
> > format=flowed.

> >> Take a look at the message source (control U) and you'll see that the
> >> physical lines are wrapped at ~72 characters.

> >>> I'd like it to wrap at some number, maybe 80, maybe 100.

> >> It sounds like you are wanting the display of the logical line to be
> >> wrapped at 80 or maybe 100 characters.

> >> That's controlled by the window width.  Read:  Make the window narrower.
> >>   ;-)

> > Yuck!  That's a horrible thing to have to do.  Why should a message's
> > line width have anything to do with the window width?

> > mutt behaves better than alpine when displaying format=flowed messages,
> > breaking lines at around 70 or 80 characters.  I think there's a
> > configuration variable for this.

> Have you looked at the viewer-margin-right config in Alpine [1]? That 
> defaults to 4 it looks like, meaning that flowed text will always be 
> wrapped only 4 columns from the right of your window. It sounds like you 
> want to increase that value.

I think that variable is just the thing.  I had a look at its
specification in the URL you give below, and it turns out that giving it
the value "73c" means "wrap text at column 73" rather than "leave space
at the end of a line".

I think this does what I want.  So thanks!

>  	-Dave

> [1] https://alpineapp.email/alpine/alpine-info/misc/flowed.htmlB

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).